Monday, March 7, 2016

I can put myself in the late 1960’s and remember
being a pre-teen looking at the cover of Projections
by The Blues Project. I stared at bassist/flautist Andy Kulberg - the guy in
the front - and thought; as a Jewish kid, that’s probably about as cool as I
could ever hope to look. The corduroy jacket and matching pants. The
double-collared shirt, flowered tie and tousled hair - oh man this guy looked
hip. In fact they all looked cool standing on Haight Street in San Francisco - Al
Kooper wearing a military surplus jacket, Danny Kalb with his flowered shirt
and early rock and roll combover - they looked like they were waiting for
history to come over and tap them on the shoulder: “Excuse me gentlemen, are
you prepared to make a singular, great album and then essentially disappear
from history, leaving a few half-baked reunions, but really just this one,
era-defining masterpiece and then gone to the sands of time?” Surely their
answer would have been “No! We are going to be huge, with hit after hit and a
gigantic fan base.” They would have been wrong, because The Blues Project did
make a couple more albums with revolving line-ups, but Projections remains the album they are defined by, and with good
reason.

Released in 1966 and produced by the great Tom
Wilson (Dylan, Zappa, Simon & Garfunkel), Projections is way ahead of its time, encompassing several genres
of music: pop, blues, jazz, all with instrumental chops and performing prowess
that few of their peers matched. The Blues Project were both crafty songwriters
and arrangers, offering up smart pop confections like their take on Chuck
Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me,” or “Cheryl’s Going Home” and “Fly Away,” but they
also excelled at taking blues numbers and stretching them out, like “Caress Me
Baby”or their masterful take on Muddy
Waters’ “Two Trains Running,” which at eleven and a half minutes is a real late
night classic, winding through memorable guitar and keyboard improvisations and
climaxing with a classic train wreck of sound. It is a great example of a slow
build, which required a listening patience that many pop fans in this era
didn’t possess. I certainly credit “Two Trains Running” equally with Fairport
Convention’s “A Sailor’s Tale”or The
Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” for expanding my own musical horizons and helping
me understand forms that expanded beyond standard pop conventions. This led me
ultimately to jazz, classical, and a larger understanding of music and its
possibilities. Projections also has a
couple of anomalous compositions that further opened my eyes. Both “Steve’s
Song” and “Flute Thing” take the popular music form to even stranger places by
dispensing with vocals and creating something entirely more contemplative.
Before I really started to understand jazz, “Flute Thing,” with its repetitive
and hypnotic melody circling around Kooper’s smart keyboard parts, served as my
rudimentary introduction to the genre. It was eye-opening and intellectually
liberating to hear young musicians unafraid to step outside the rules of AM
radio.

There are only a handful of records I can point
to that changed the way I think about music, but Projections is surely one of them. In spite of the fact that The
Beatles were using more sophisticated song structures with lots of fancy chords,
and Dylan was expressing very elevated sentiments in his lyrics, The Blues
Project were also briefly successful at filling the dancefloors of psychedelic
ballrooms with extended groovy tunes. There is a simple joy in the making of
and equally in the listening to this music which reminds me of why I originally
fell for it in the first place. It’s really well-played, exuberant music that
thrills me to this day. Only Al Kooper went on to have a tremendously
successful career after The Blues Project, but all of the performances on this
album are first rate and show all the musicians to be top-notch. Projections is a definitive 1960’s rock
album in that its feet are firmly planted in Chicago blues and the top 10
charts while its head is deep in the cosmos.